Art: On the Block

Hardly an eyebrow lifted when in Manhattan last week a dust-filled,
muscular, melodramatic painting was knocked down for that fancy price.
The painting: A Dash for Timber, by Frederic Remington, No. 1 painter-illustrator of the old
Wild West, fast friend of Teddy Roosevelt. Was $23,000 high?

It was. Yet cash is plentiful in the current U.S. art marketand
pedigreed paintings are scarce. Average collectors may well be confused
by recent auction prices. So may experts. (The jolt of the year was a
Bellini from the Jules Bache collection. Bache had paid $160,000 for...